Leadership and Teamwork Theme Analysis

When Nick embarks on his quest to turn the made-up word "frindle" (meaning “pen”) into a term accepted by the masses, he recognizes immediately that he cannot change the English language on his own. In making it clear that Nick is a leader but is, more than anything, a team player, Frindle focuses on the value of collective action and suggests that working together towards a common goal is one of the best and most successful ways to enact change.

Even prior to the fifth grade, Nick discovers that his pranks are far more successful when he's able to bring in others to help him. For instance, he skillfully ropes his entire third grade class into making Miss Deaver's room a tropical island, and Janet Fisk is more than willing to help Nick torment Mrs. Avery with high-pitched bird noises in fourth grade.

When it comes to making "frindle" take hold, Nick skillfully uses his charisma to gradually bring in supporters. He begins with a group of six students who all take an oath to only use "frindle" instead of "pen," and eventually expands this to the entire fifth grade class of 150 students. Because the students act collectively, Mrs. Granger's attempts to punish them morph into status symbols or rites of passage rather than remain true punishments. In this way, the students come to think of serving detention with her as a "badge of honor"—rather than signifying that a student misbehaved, serving detention instead connotes that a student is part of a larger movement. In other words, acting together offers Nick's classmates a way to find solidarity and support each other as they fight for their right to use "frindle" rather than "pen." This suggests that one of the major upsides of working as a team is this sense of camaraderie—which is strong enough to turn something intended to be a punishment into something positive. Nick and his classmates also find that there's safety and power in numbers. Eventually, parents and even the school administrators become annoyed that Mrs. Granger is keeping hundreds of children after school in detention. Soon she's forced to stop giving detention for the use of "frindle" at all, a turn of events that only happened because enough people got upset.

One of the reasons that this prank in particular requires teamwork is because in order to change a word, buy-in from others is necessary. Simply deciding to call pens "frindles" as a solo act wouldn't have done much of anything, as language is something that connects people to each other and is predicated on a shared understanding of what words mean. Nick would've simply been unintelligible to everyone else had he not drawn in others to help him spread the word. This reinforces the communal aspect of language itself, as well as reinforces Nick's understanding of how teamwork and unity can bring about change.

Notably, Nick takes what he learns about the power of community and applies it to other causes in the future. The narrator says that there are many things that Nick was able to change during his time as a student, but it offers only his successful bid to improve Westfield's cafeteria food as an example of what can be achieved through collective action. Though Frindle doesn't take the idea any further than that, it's worth noting that Nick is learning a valuable lesson that will continue to benefit him even as he enters adulthood. Teamwork, collective action, and unified protest have brought about all manner of changes throughout history, and have been essential elements of labor, suffrage, and civil rights movements worldwide. With this, Frindle becomes more than a lesson in language—Nick's organizing teaches young readers how to be active, engaged, and questioning citizens and makes it clear that when people work together towards a common goal, they'll be able to make real change in their communities.